CSS - Cascading Style Sheets

I was having some trouble trying to make my site look good. I went to the point of approaching a web design company.

While talking to a friend of mine from college, he pointed out that it sounds like all I needed was a CSS template/layout.

So I went to google and found a couple sites.

I couldn't have been more happier. Takes all the design work out of this and I can just focus on the PHP/MySQL backend.

Thank you google and freecsstemplates.

New Direction

The new direction that my project is taking is as follows...

Create a website that has quizzes designed to help increase your vocabulary. The website will require a user login and password to keep track of your quizzes.

you can also share you quiz results with your friends, form groups and there will also be a discussion/comments section for each quiz where users can comment.

I'm building the site in php and mysql and will use a css template to make everything look pretty.

just keeping myself busy until school starts again.

New Focus

Sorry for the long lapse in posts. Like 10 months or so huh?

Anyways, I'm back to coding again. Messing with PHP and MySQL to come up with a database driven website.

Just a couple more updates, I recently applied to graduate business school. Now if one of my three recommenders would get his letter of recommendation in, then I can finally rest assured that my application is complete and in process.

I was thinking of doing a general management MBA but there's also a technical ventures certificate that I would like to pursue.

So far it's been MS Engineering, Law School, Pre-Med and now MBA.

If you knew me, then you wouldn't be surprised.

Until the next post.

Back again...

With the real world beating down my door, the startup has had to take a backseat. I recently got in real deep with the iPhone SDK Book Apress Book

Another interesting story on the horizon though, is the one between Apple slapping 20 infringement suits on HTC. Nothing so much against HTC, but more against Google. The romance between the two companies used to be so sweet. Read more about it here.

I was on a flight coming back from a work trip and I had the book out while I was playing around with the iPhone SDK. I made a big notice of just how many people have an iPhone or iPod touch.

These devices have really reached out and changed the global landscape of commuting. I can't remember the last time, since the cellphone, that so many people have bought into a trend, device, etc.

Makes you wonder what's going to make that next change. I read an interesting book about trends and how they catch on: Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

So my question to you is, are you a trendsetter, a trend follower, a connector, or a salesperson?

Hello World!

As with every programming language, the first program that you ever write is the "Hello World" program.

Well I just downloaded the iPhone SDK (3GBs, sheesh!) but I have to say it's pretty sweet. I'm reading through some tutorials online on how to code in this SDK and I have to say it's pretty intimidating.

I don't have a very solid background in programming. The most I've ever done is worked with some Perl script for one of my old jobs running a pipe stress analysis program on a UNIX OS.

That added to the PHP and MySQL stuff that I've learned in the past month, I would say that I'm pretty green when it comes to coding.

As with any Apple product, it relies heavily on the Objective C language. Let's just say I've been switching back and forth heavily between working in the IDE and google searching everything.

I came across this one sweet tutorial icodeblog.com

It's pretty dummy proof.

But alas you can see my frankenstein here:



"Hello World!"

Outsource the rest...

In a previous post, I posted a link to an interview with the Urbanspoon guys and if there is anything that I found more agreeable in what they said it's this:

"Stick to what you're passionate and interested in and outsource the rest"

I can't for the life of me ever get into a creative project that involves creating logos, color schemes, fonts, etc. Knowing this, I will probably never ever in my life work the front end of a website.

So with this project, I'm content to being able to develop a PHP backend accessing a mySQL database. With this in mind, my end product will be a bare bones beta version that will have no aesthic quality to it whatsoever. But it's gonna work and it's gonna work great!

So when it's time to make this project look pretty, I'll probably post a contest to the site 99designs.com Check it out! I like the concept. You put together a brief of your project, you name your price and people out there will compete on it. If you find one that works for you, you can comment and fine tune, provide feedback and get a better quality design. If you're not satisfied, then you don't have to pay.

Simple as pie. Like they said, "Stick to what you're interested in and passionate about and outsource the rest."

I found an error...and I'm about to run with it

You remember back in school when you would sit down and take a test and work out the problem on the board? You would get all the way through the problem and then for some reason it just wouldn't work out. You would get something like "0 = 0."

No matter how much you worked and re-worked, risking not finishing the entire test over this whole problem, which is like #2 out of 5, you kept re-working trying to figure out where you went wrong cus you knew you that it wasn't you.

So finally you walk up to the teacher and say something. You show your work and you're like "I think there's a typo. You wrote the problem down wrong." The teacher looked at you but this isn't the first time you've questioned his or her authority. He's got this "Who you think you are..." look on his face, "Punk ass 8th grader."

So he works it out and BOOM...you were right and he was wrong. You're basking in your glory trying to hold it in from not breaking out into an MC Hammer dance and rub it in his face.

Well that's what happened as I was working through Kevin Yank's book. Peep the following code:

$result = mysqli_query($link,
'select joke.id, joketext, name, email
from joke inner join author
on authorid = author.id');
if (!$result)
{
$error = 'Error fetching jokes: ' . mysqli_error($link);
include 'error.html.php';
exit();
}

while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result))
{
$jokes[] = array('id' => $row['id'], 'text' => $row['joketext'], 'name' => $joke['name'], 'email' => $joke['email']);
}

which when ran produces the following error:



I'm pretty sure what he meant to write was:

$result = mysqli_query($link,
'select joke.id, joketext, name, email
from joke inner join author
on authorid = author.id');
if (!$result)
{
$error = 'Error fetching jokes: ' . mysqli_error($link);
include 'error.html.php';
exit();
}

while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result))
{
$jokes[] = array('id' => $row['id'], 'text' => $row['joketext'], 'name' => $ROW['name'], 'email' => $ROW['email']);
}

I'll spare you the details and let's just say that you "joke"d when you should have "row"d.

You might want to take care of that Kevin, and make sure I get my props.